This seems to align with the mindset of pragmatism in the Nordics. I can imagine somebody there saying "This is now a standard business technology. So, we will teach it to our students to prepare them."
Correct. We don't have a lot of people up here, so any individual person who gets hired to a job has to be ready to wear many hats. To my understanding this is even more true in Norway than in my adoptive home of Finland (sounds exciting, my wife and I are strongly considering moving).
Technologies like GPT-4, much like Google search before it, vastly increase the number of things we can do acceptably well without needing to study it in depth beforehand - letting us save those extra brain cells for where they really count.
Given that we know people aren't infinitely intelligent and they perform better with intellectual tasks if given more time...
Unless you have an abundance of "free" brain power eg. you work physical labor or otherwise don't have a job that requires mental work... how isn't brain cells (figuratively speaking) a scarce resource?
A small paper with a linited study on 300 students from Pakistan and China and the result is “Accepting AI without addressing the major human concerns would be like summoning the devils” .
Who knew Nature could sound like a bible thumping southern baptist.
Personal prediciton. AI fears on human IQ is about as valid as fears of the television and computer games have historically been.
Aka incredibly powerful teaching tools wjhen used right, damaging propaganda when used wrong.
Autonomois warfare is what scares me, not this hysterical crap everythime humans get a new useful technology.
First of all, which «AI»?! AI is either a system that can replace some professional (historical sense) or a system that implements intelligence ("AGI").
Specifically, masses relying on unintelligent responses are exposed to unintelligence (e.g. a number of people may absorb the il-logic), so as an aggregate there are risks.
__A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced.__
Nice! I get emails from Meetup with subject texts like "You're the organisator [that this and that Meetup needs]" and every time I open that email to find out what the complete sentence is and am a little bit relieved to find out I'm not an organisator of something by accident. It's on the edge, but not over it. Smart marketing from Meetup.
This reminds me of something more innocuous but funny that happens to me. Innocuous because it's not on purpose.
When I forget to start Slack and someone sends me a message, Slack sends me an email saying "You have a new direct message in <channel>".
Well, it so happens that when I get this, the notification dialog that pops up to tell me about the email is just the right width that it gets cut off as "You have a new dire.."
The first several times this happened I went straight to Slack eager to find out what was so important.
Which part of that is the subject line? Does it include the entire sentence as long as your email client can display it? Or does it literally cut off the sentence mid-point? I would call that misleading and definitely over the edge.
“Acquired” is only really used for the purchase of businesses, at least in headlines, and especially in tech news. The awkward translation is indeed a garden path sentence when delivered to this crowd.
About the only real counterargument is that you could also interpret the translation as trading the business for 110,000 students and teachers. That would not be garden path as it would be (accidentally) misleading wording in its entirety!
I think garden pathiness requires not merely that you got the wrong noun (the company itself, not their product), but that you got an entirely different parse tree.
Since many commenters are wondering, yes it is GPT-3.5 access through Azure if I am correct. University of Oslo has already done this for their staff and students. They have built a UI https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/ai/gpt-uio/index.html . They call it privacy-focused ChatGPT, but it is poor quality UI and doesn't have access to GPT-4. It is possible to buy access to GPT-4 but that will be expensive.
Good point, but when I sign in I only see GPT-3. My understanding is UiO students and employees have free access to GPT-4 while the other institutions had to buy that as an extra service.
Why not use a combination of open source and OpenAI models? GPT-3.5 is already beaten by Mixtral and Mistral-Medium. The first one you can host for free and the second has a darn cheap API while getting really close to GPT-4 performance.
Even the free GPT-3.5 is better at smaller European languages than Mixtral/Mistral-Medium.
However I think it's a typo when the article says GPT-3.5. It doesn't make sense to "buy" GPT-3.5. They probably meant ChatGPT Plus which includes GPT-4 access (50 messages in a rolling 3 hour window).
There are certain "quality of life" issues with the open source ecosystem. I don't blame them for choosing (not at all) OpenAI. For one putting together a chatgpt like experience that supports reliably at least chat history and per user system prompts of different models, requires a chat client that doesn't exist (at least it didn't a couple of months ago when I was looking for one). The closest we have now is a vscode plugin written by one guy I had to modify to work with multiple models (but it is a pretty good OpenAI api client). Also, OpenAI API is a defacto standard for clients talking to AI chat bots. To set it up with Mixtral I had to put together a non trivial system of huggingface TGI server (code extended to support token bias, cfg and negative prompts), and a (very slightly modified) litellm proxy to translate OpenAI api to TGI API. These products were used from the latest github branch and all had various shortcomings that required coding to resolve. Now I can say I truly have an "OpenAI - like" chat experience. But one huge functionality is missing. Function calling. Although implementing it now that I already have context free grammars is not that difficult, it still requires time I haven't found yet. Compare this to just paying a fee every month and getting it all done for you.
Still I believe it is very important people recreate what OpenAI offers locally using open source software. Why? Be it is clear AI's like chatgpt is essentially sold well below cost now to hook people up. In 5 years from now once no one will be able to maintain their productivity without it, (not at all)OpenAI will raise the prices 100x and everyone will pay begrudgingly. Then they will raise them 100x more and people will pay too... Unless there is a viable alternative. This is why I(and many like me) are working on having my own.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the deal was somehow done via Microsoft and some contract they already have with the Norwegian government. This is how certain ms tech end up with the Irish government so quickly.
Mistral , open source etc do not have a sales force. Shame really
Mistral models, in particular Mixtral 8x7, while free to download, are not "free" to run. Even if you have the necessary high end GPUs lying around unused (which is already highly unlikely to begin with), you still need to build and maintain a whole infrastructure around them. It would be extremely difficult to do this more cost effective per computed token than say OpenAI or any of the other big API providers.
There is a worry expressed in the article about inequality arising from some students having paid access to gpt4 whereas the bulk of the students only get access to gpt3.5. I'm hoping to see openai release an update to the 3.5 model that makes this gap in performance be less relevant.
That's pretty much Europe. Drastically different mindsets from London to Istanbul and Oslo to Barcelona. Sometimes I'm surprised how EU(though a smaller subset of Europe) even manages to agree on anything.
I mentioned them due to their geographic positional extremes. Replace Istanbul with Athens, London with Amsterdam and Oslo with Stockholm ıf you want to include EU only cities and its the same thing, just slightly narrower geography. EU is a subset of Europe but its very wide subset, which includes most of the extremes.
A mix and match of the US immediately after the constitution was signed and the US during the Articles of Confederation is the best way to think about it
That was long ago. Europe's latest great war was like 80 years ago, the standardisation and free movement through EU and Schengen are even fresher. The language barriers aren't even lifted yet, though the young seems to be quite good with adopting English as lingua franca. Yet, most of the Europeans can't talk to each other because the older generations in general will speak the language of their neighbour only and that will be around the border regions. Some smaller countries are better though.
"European" as an identity is a rough diamond still.
I do not see the contradiction. It is not so different rationale, considering that the point of purchasing a gpt3.5 license is privacy-related, as was the ban. But Italy is much bigger and less inclined towards social-spending than norway also, so yeah you would not expect it to buy such a license, especially back then.
Europe is essentially a market economy for economical and societal experiments. Ton of sovereign nations that can try out different things and the rest can see what works and what doesn't.
Too bad some people want to abuse EU to destroy this and move towards monolithic slob with little variance.
When you ask an AI for a list of citations and it returns a list of 10 names, pages and dates no amount of 'critical thinking' will let you determine which answers are correct or incorrect, you have to sit there and painfully cross-reference each one.
The 'critical thinking' part at this point in time leads you to only one conclusion: that the tool is unreliable and dangerous and shouldn't be used. Or, you're teaching kids that they need to cross-reference all 'authoritative sources' which leads to a complete failure of the system - if you give kids a textbook will they have been 'trained' by GPT to not believe a word of any of the claims in it without cross-referencing? How does that enable better education.
If you provide a tool from a position of authority it needs to be a reliable and believable tool; standing in a position of authority and handing out access (to children!) to a lie box and asking those children to 'rely on it' is frankly abusive. That's beyond mixed messaging, that's just some form of weird mental torture.
But if the second and third and fourth source exists (let us suppose the 5th doesn't) what will the kids trust, the AI or the search engine? We all know that google is becoming crap and high schools on average don't have a 'proper' library so... Will they assume the first source exists but isn't indexed?
I just think it's a real issue to give kids free access to a tool that so confidently makes stuff up. I know that textbooks aren't perfect but they're at least audited by a committee of experts, mistakes slip in but there's oversight, there's a procedure to ensure that they're reliable representations of (currently understood) facts, and that when politics enters the textbook production process it (correctly) becomes a bit of a national scandal.
I hope for that too. But I believe it wont. The complete Fake News topic just shows that everyone is happy trusting information that matches their beliefs. There is never any critical thinking or verification if it is actually true or just made up.
And its enough when such a technology is 80% right. Nobody will verify every answer if it is correct most of the time.
Although kids necessarily don't have those ego dependent beliefs ingrained within them yet. So if they see that false information can be presented very convincingly, perhaps they learn not to trust just everything and in addition question what their parents are telling them.
The issue arises when the belief you have is tied to your ego so you only cherry-pick the evidence that will satisfy your ego and ignore/question everything else, but not this.
Adults accept all manner of weird claims generated by humans on Facebook, television or in their mailbox as fact, especially if said confidently and authoritiatively. So while I expect many kids to also accept hallucinations as fact, I am not sure that is a much different world.
Same as with every piece of information in the past. How do people react to information now? If the source seems to be trusted, or confirm existing biases and expectations, they will likely believe it.
My opinion: irresponsible for children; it's just that some civil servants want to show that they understand the trend. They love to do this kind of movement in order to "show off". But the fact is that they only have a partial understanding of this technology and follow what others say.
There is no information that they compared open source models and considered whether to build their own data servers.
You should at least do some experiments to show that gpt can improve quality in education, right? Although I know that data manipulation is common in scientific research nowadays by picking the data that better serve the wanted assumption, but this time they even skip this step.
Disclaimer: I live in Oslo; I'm an educator; I usually see similar poor decisions in education due to ignorance.
I agree. I have a daughter attending primary school in Oslo(barneskole); they use iPad for almost everything because some years ago Norwegian government decided that using a tablet is important for they digital skills.
As result, we have to spend half hour after dinner everyday to help her practicing reading and writing because they spend so much time in front of a screen.
I don't argue that using digital tools can be helpful but replacing almost all handwriting with digital devices, in my opinion, is harmful for children development.
If it is an iPad, it stands to reason that people from the education and medical departments should first evaluate whether there is any damage to the children's brains and eyes.
But the logic in Oslo is that our municipal government has a budget, and buying it at least shows what I have done as a civil servant.
I don’t know if you can get their “must do something” mentality.
> But the logic in Oslo is that our municipal government has a budget, and buying it at least shows what I have done as a civil servant.
That sounds reasonably similar to me. People keep buying iPads for classrooms because “it puts technology in the classroom” or something like that. Then they break and get sold for scrap.
Exactly. I‘ve seen it sold that anyone has less books to carry and they could do more digital stuff - but nobody had any real plans. In the end one of ten text books was a PDF and you didn‘t gain anything. Its worse, now your textbook can have no battery and there are no electricity plugs near you…
Not having a computer lab, even in the 90s, seems irresponsible to me.
Yes, figuring out how to teach and what to teach using computers was difficult, but students needs familiarity with computers and how to use them.
Saying that "they'll learn on their own in their spare time" is ridiculous and tantamount to saying schools shouldn't be teaching reading, because students will want to read on their own outside school and they already have access to books at home.
Putting iPad's and Computer labs in the same category is weird actually. One is a consumption good except for certain use cases and the other is a treasure trove for teaching.
BTW a lot of corporations that have yearly IT budgets replace large portions of PC's and server goods and sell them to schools for a dollar (or Euro). I wish that my school growing up knew about this.
> Yes, figuring out how to teach and what to teach using computers was difficult, but students needs familiarity with computers and how to use them.
Someone coming in here and %s/computers/ChatGPT/g is going to make an argument that sounds equally reasonable—so if ChatGPT is truly, materially different and worse, then the argument against it is a different argument.
My complaint here is that schools are making educational decisions based on technological fads, without good plans for how to use these technologies in education. Yes, a stopped clock is right twice a day—sometimes, it will be the right decision. Sometimes it will be the wrong decision. The trick is knowing the difference.
Just saw that Altman is working with Johnny Ives on AI hardware... could an AI (Microsoft) phone which it's UI focus is a text or voice prompt with some app icons but not app icon driven (how the phone UX paradigm is now) be in the works? The text or voice prompt performs & displays your requests in text, voice and or graphical representations of the data and or task you requested it to complete. No need to drill down into an app and click through screens to complete a task, find info you seek .. the AI driven phone does all the drilling down for you and shows (speaks too if you choose) what you requested in a nice pretty format (graphical representation with text to infographs). No need to go or even use Google!
Norwegian here. I assume you mean "Utdanningsetaten", which literally translates to "The Education Agency". Apparently sweden does not use the same name, as their word for education is slightly different (utbildning instead of utdanning). Not sure why the translator got it so wrong.
Seems like a "bug" of some sort in google translate. If you remove some context it works.
"Utdanningsetaten" translates to "Education Agency". But I guess instead of "The Education Agency" it tries to translate it into context, which should be "The Norwegian Education Agency".
However it seems confused about which country is being talked about so it just think it's Sweden maybe.
Many universities in Greece currently are closed due to student demonstrations and in many of those the teachers denied holding virtual exams due to lack of standardized exam software and ChatGPT. One could argue that instead of generic questions they could run the exams on questions/topics only taught in class which would be “a bit” difficult for ChatGPT to answer but I guess their excuses have less to do with ChatGPT itself and more with other topics…
What teachers could do. A lot of them are not doing anything special and just repeat their low quality teaching material. But sure some are genuinely trying to help students understand the topic, be open about the world and even help them in their personal issues. We have excellent tools now for the crude information transmission that could relieve teachers from that annoying part of the job and would allow them to really focus on helping the students in all their dimensions. And that's the part that AI and learning technologies are not able to replace for now if ever. Seeing teachers as pure information providers is a mistake that I have seen in students, parents, teachers and school directors unfortunately, and this usually have disastrous results on students that ripple far in their future.
Presumably in the sense of setting ground rules - "don't use it for school assignments". No different from saying "you're supposed to do the homework yourself, not pay somebody else to do it for you".
It will be interesting to see how this shapes the lives of the students and educators. Its embrace signals some acquiescence to the reality that LLMs are here to stay and may as well be used to their full potential. I imagine students being able to cover a lot of ground on a topic with ChatGPT and interrogate it with detail, as well as learn how to fact check its contents. This stands in sharp contrast towards US schools which seem to treat it as a chance to cheat. Very different mentalities about learning and life stand behind that contrast.
I use chatgpt, begrudgingly, because it's frequently wrong and takes a lot of iterations to get something right. But, I use it, because Google sucks. I would have very little use for chatgpt with the Google of,I guess, like 10-12 years ago.
You could go back even further and ~25 years ago, I had an entire class on using search engines and all manner of advanced operators and search techniques.
With today's computing power it would be awesome to see what the search engines of past decades could have become if not for the monetary incentives to obscure information and increase engagement.
I feel very similar. I would like an LLM search engine which is adept at finding pertinent information, but does not try to re-synthesise what it finds.
Am I the only one left with a deep distrust of ChatGPT? It still lies ("hallucinates"), doesn't it? And no, I will not accept a rebuttal that says, "well everyone lies" because no, not everyone is as confidently wrong as ChatGPT. It's doesn't qualify statements with, "I was told..." or, "some believe..." or, "I'm not sure but it might be..." It just flat out lies. People are enthralled with this tech when they should still be very very skeptical.
It's often confidently wrong, but it's still a useful tool.
I spent 5 minutes searching Google for what an email error code meant, it kept showing me threads on Microsoft's forums that never gave me a clear answer. Took about 10 seconds to get the correct answer on ChatGPT.
If you treat it like it's a bumbling assistant that has remarkably encyclopedic knowledge, it's a very helpful tool. If you treat it like it's truly intelligent and let it do your thinking for you, then you're going to have some problems.
Took about 10 seconds to get the correct answer on ChatGPT.
But, generally speaking, if you don’t have some way of verifying what the correct answer is, how can you be sure that the answers you get in 10 seconds from the LLM are actually correct?
If you don't have a way of verifying what the correct answer is, then is there actually a correct answer at all?
In many cases, programming included, you don't actually care if it's 100% correct, it is enough to just give you a nudge, show you the way forward, suggest some ideas etc.
If whatever it is you are doing can be verified for correctness, then of course you will check the answer. But for creative pursuits there often is no correct answer, and generative AI (LLMs included) excel at that.
Right. The two areas where I've found current AI to be useful are code generation where I can fairly easily check the results and creative stuff where it doesn't matter.
I don't understand how people feel they can use it as a search engine replacement. If you have to go separately check the results then it doesn't seem like it's saving any time. I suspect people are just trusting the output a lot more than they should.
Before ChatGPT I had to manually investigate and read through multiple pages of potentially irrelevant stuff to find an answer I could try to verify. If you find an answer on StackOverflow, you still need to integrate and verify it.
Now I get an answer straight away just by asking a question, and can skip manual knowledge extraction step to get right on answer verification step (i.e. compiling, testing, extending).
Even if ChatGPT is nothing else except a way to fuzzy search and summarize found results, even just that is already hugely helpful and has almost completely replaced Google for me.
Hmm, all I'm hearing is that ChatGPT should run for President.
But on a serious note I have only gotten good content out of ChatGPT when it's used as a smart Thesaurus, or a code checker (even that was 50:50). If I have a paragraph that I feel needs rewriting or condensing I can throw it in and resubmit until I get a good result - which I still then need to edit to make it less... ChatGPTish. If I open up old scripts (data extraction/analysis) that I forgot what they do I chuck it in and find out what will happen.
Like any large technological advance, the hype is much larger than the eventual reality (see VR goggles).
It doesn't "lie" (there's no intent to deceive). It makes "mistakes" [1]. It's a tool that is increasingly a part of the modern world whether you like it or not. Students who learn how to use the tool, which includes learning its limitations, will benefit overall.
[1] technically it doesn't even make "mistakes", it's just an LLM doing its thing, but we humans like to anthropomorphise
when a child makes up things that it knows not to be real there is no intent to deceive either. the child lacks the capacity to understand the difference. yet we will tell the child that it is lying.
just like a child, chatgpt can not tell the difference between reality and fiction.
chatgpt lies because it presents fiction as fact. there is no intent to deceive necessary.
We do like our anthropomorphisation, and I prefer to say that ChatGPT and its pal likes to "bullshit". They're neither "trying" to tell the truth nor trying to lie - they trying to sound plausible, with a cheerful disregard of the value of truth.
The students are using it anyway, so Oslo decided that teaching students to use it would be the best path. That way they can teach the students about the hallucinations and about ethical ways to use the technology.
It does make mistakes, but it gets stuff right enough to be worth it. And if you catch it in a lie, you can just tell it and usually it will correct itself.
To me, it is like a junior developer. It does the bulk of the work and whenever there is an issue, you can tell it like in a code review to fix a particular piece. Look past the confidence level and focus on the work product.
Remember, it doesn’t need to always be accurate. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to outperform the alternative (passable job here) for the price paid (amazing value here).
A junior developer will figure out and hopefully confess when he's way over his head, but ChatGPT will happily respond "oh right you are, that makes no sense, here's a corrected version"—just to respond with a version that is also false in a way that might not be readily apparent. ChatGPT ultimately doesn't know what it doesn't know, unless it's been told so explicitly (this is my current understanding which may be flawed; I'd like to know the "not knowing" would otherwise work in this system!).
But indeed it's still quite useful. It's best used in situations where it doesn't matter much if the answer is right, or when the answer can be easily checked if it's correct, yet more annoying to come up by oneself in the first place.
As long as you _know the right answer_, ChatGPT is a very useful tool
90% of the time I know the code I want to write. ChatGPT just writes it for me, when I read it I can confirm it is what I would have written, or fix it if not (or more likely: tell ChatGPT to fix it)
This means I don’t have to google for syntax, canonical ways of doing things, etc.
If you are asking ChatGPT for facts, triple check everything it tells you. Or better still, paste the Wikipedia entry to it first, then ask for the style or type of writing you are interested in about those facts
I came here to say this as well.
Every time someone replies with "I've asked ChatGPT.." or "Why not ask ChatGPT?" I get seriously mad.
It's like religious people. Totally convinced of a fake story and therefore tells it as truth.
> People are enthralled with this tech when they should still be very very skeptical.
Yes, that's the real issue.
Everyone should be very skeptical about ChatGPT responses. But instead it's often trusted blindly, because "it's often enough correct".
But I get the idea behind this particular move and at least it can be a chance to teach the students to distrust it.
It’s pretty solid on well understood facts, physics, mathematics. It’s not so good at problem solving, it’s pretty good at code in some languages but it others. It’s quite good at translation in a number of languages. It’s great and fictional writing in any particular style.
Isn’t denying these facts just as dogmatic as accepting them blindly?
You're judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Retrieving truthful information about the world is one of the possible ways to use of GPT models, but neither is the best working, nor the most helpful.
Instead, think of it as a computer that can perform transformations on text, described in plain language and based on text's tone and meaning.
You need to distrust ChatGPT if you want to use if effectively. I'm paying for the 4.0 version, I know that it will hallucinate BS, yet I also think it's a fantastic tool that will get some things done faster than any other way.
There's its ability to write small one-off scripts for me. I've given it an example of a structured log file and told it to "write a pyparser script to parse this string" and it will do that. What would take me a hour to learn pyparser and get somewhere now takes a few minutes. You can literally see it iterate on different solutions until it comes up with something acceptable. (ChatGPT 3.5 doesn't do that.)
Another great use case is as an assistant when I'm learning some new topic.
I was reading A Mathematical Theory of Communications, the breakthrough thesis by Claude Shannon. It's quite accessible, but there are always points where you don't quite understand a point that is being made and you want to get more examples. I can ask ChatGPT to create a concrete example, use actual numbers, plot a graph that illustrates the concept. And it will do that, along with the Python script that it used to create the graph so I can double check what it did. "Create an Eb/No graph for the following parameters." And then ask to modify the graph to illustrate a particular point. Google can deliver similar information, but it will push me a document that contains the answer, along with a truckload of info that I wasn't looking for. ChatGPT pulls just the info that I'm looking for.
Or lately I was looking into Laplace transformations, low pass filters, pole/zero plots etc. ChatGPT 4.0 uses the SymPy symbolic math package to derive the math, I can once again examine the scripts, ask for concrete examples with graphs and so forth. It's way more efficient than doing the same thing with Google, which will usually send you StackExchange with an answer that is not quite what you're looking for.
In these kind of cases, I know enough math and subject knowledge to know when it's bullshitting, but it doesn't have to be 100% accurate to a huge help in learning.
I don't wanna be the guy who pulls out the "you're holding the phone wrong" from Apple, but... you're holding the phone wrong.
Here's an example of some thing I did off the cuff. I have a bunch of hand written notes that are mind maps and graphs written on old notebooks from 10 years ago. I snapped a picture of all of the different graphs, threw them into chatGPT and asked it to convert them to mermaid UML syntax.
Every single one of them converted flawlessly when I brought them into my markdown editor.
The amazing thing here is that that the ChatGPT large language model wasn't even explicitly trained for this at all, but with the massive quantity of data that it's trained on its able to just connect the dots.
If you're using chatGPT as nothing more than a glorified fact checker and not taking advantage of the multimodal capabilities such as vision, OCR, Python VM, generative imagery, you're really missing the point.
Much faster, 10x cheaper and still good enough for most things.
I don't think gpt-4 is worth its 10fold price premium for all but niche usecases (coding may be one but I don't do that too much). And the much longer response delays are annoying.
I think 3.5 turbo is a really nice general use model. And the price difference makes it worry free (I use it a lot and most months I used less than $1) whereas gpt-4 really tends to trigger disturbing invoices after using it a bit :)
I still have 4 on tap for a second opinion if I'm dissatisfied with gpt-3.5 but in general it doesn't really yield much better results, whereas better prompt engineering helps much more with both models.
Of course YMMV but I wouldn't write gpt-3.5 off just because it's no longer the coolest kid on the block.
I don't trust Google enough to feed them my data though. I don't even use a google account on my Android devices :)
OpenAI and Microsoft aren't a lot better but it is somewhat better at least.
So Gemini isn't an option for me. Curiously enough, LLaMa 2 is, even though it's from meta, but the fact that you can run it at home is of course a real winner for privacy.
Still great. The better students get at writing prompts, the better they get at formulating what they want, learning to be more precise, and seeing how what they say could be confusing. Think of how search engines [used to] train people to use basic logic to disambiguate.
Yes it is GPT-3.5 access through Azure if I am correct. University of Oslo has already done this for their staff and students. They have built a UI https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/ai/gpt-uio/index.html . They call it privacy-focused chatgpt but it is poor quality UI and doesnt have access to GPT-4.
the article recognizes a potential divide between those who pay for the gpt-4 model or not. personally using either is not worth the trade off, but i did see from my own experiences the impact of having the right things can have on your work ethic.
when i changed schools and realized that students scored more because they have access to past exams and they would rather practice them then study the material. in a competitive environment, it nudged me to also adapt to this strategy rather than learning the concepts the intended way.
regarding hallucinations, i wonder how much critical thinking would matter. back when students referred to wikipedia or random search results for an essay, a fair bit of them just take the material for its word.
This is only a minor invest compared to the financial support they provide for the students already. I tried to google the exact amount of funding they get. The best I came up with is a 8890 USD loan per year where 40% of it will be converted to a grant once they receive their degree.
This article is talking about elementary, middle and high schools in Oslo municipality. The grant you're talking about is for higher education nation wide.
I bet it has to do with laws around processing of data for children.
From the ChatGPT terms:
> Minimum Age. You must be at least 13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use the Services. If you are under 18 you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use the Services.
Data protection and privacy for one. As the article says none of the student interaction will be used for training data which probably means you'll have to iron out some sort of educational licensing deal with OpenAI and separate access to the API for students.
I've had many discussions with non-technical people, teachers, engineers, academics and researchers on the topic of education and AI. The conversation often starts with me asking this question:
In a future where every person has an all-knowing assistance in their pocket --a nearly perfect AI who knows it all-- what should we teach in schools, from early childhood to university?
The corollary to that question is:
When that happens, what will be important in people? How do people add value to an organization?
The answers are, as might be expected, varied.
Some are dismissive. They simply do not believe that moment will come or that it will be as described. That it cannot be as described.
Others are more apocalyptic and come very close to being fearful of this future.
Yet another group is glad they are older and will get to watch this happen while retired.
In some cases there's a struggle understanding how to teach certain subjects, mathematics being a typical example. If you have a device that can solve any and all mathematical problems --and even explain them-- what do you need to know about math?
My take so far --I say "so far" because this doesn't even approach a supportable conclusion-- is that the differentiating factor will be experience and the ability to effectively connect, or use, multidisciplinary knowledge.
Maybe I look at this from an entrepreneurial perspective. A small experienced team will be able to rent or buy thousands of experts and workers across every possible discipline and, using their experience, put them to work towards a stated objective. A person who is "mono-skilled" (I'm sure that's not a term), will not be able to utilize these tools to the same level of advantage.
And, yes, I think you will have to know a lot about a lot of subjects. That's the only way to understand if the AI tools and workers are rowing in the right direction. How we impart this knowledge is a different matter.
One thing is certain, education will have to change radically to address the devaluation of raw knowledge in favor of being able to take different types of knowledge lego blocks to make things happen.
It is possible that Norway's leaders just made a genius move by making ChatGPT available to everyone in this way. Brilliant.
I think LLMs+search like Bard, Bing, Phind.com or Perplexity.ai are decent replacements to bare search. Average web content is worse than GPT stuff. You can see that when they compare models trained on raw web vs other sources (books) or curated web. Using bare search means you have to wade through the garbage, a dumpster diving-like experience. You still need to validate everything, on the web or in a LLM window, and that still requires you have sufficient experience in that topic.
And how you gonna validate it? By search? I'm not saying LLMs can't be good assistance, but it does no good to kids. It's more important for kids to learn how to identify the truth by digging it themselves.
I find it disgusting that EU governments are giving even a singular cent to Micro$oft, and I don't even mean for this, I mean in general. The data harvesting psychopathic megacorporation that should've been nuked from orbit 2 decades ago is now growing more and more influential, and there's nothing your average EU citizen can do about it since politicians are all spineless cowards easily bought by M$'s vast coffers.
Though surely you'd agree that just because some predicted consequence of an effect at one order of magnitude fails to occur (or occurs at an acceptable level), doesn't mean said effect is therefore irrelevant at any scale. The advent of radio led to a number of predictions about negative social consequences. Similar concerns were expressed over television, and then again over social media. We could debate whatever negative consequences radio and TV had, but the exceptionally negative consequence of social media are indisputable at this point.
So too here, one could argue the positive/negative impacts of things like the calculator on our mental capabilities, but chatbots are taking this automation of mental processes up an order of a magnitude both in terms of the breadth of things that can be "input", and the variable quality of what is output.
The unfortunate thing is really the only way to test this is to basically do what we did with social media - just let a generation have at it, and see what happens.
If chatgpt was a more sophisticated tool for engaging with the same concepts that would be similar, but its not. Chatgpt isnt a pencil vs a typewriter, its a stochastic parrot, one of the worst applications i could imagine it being used for is helping develop young peoples' world views.
> one of the worst applications i could imagine it being used for is helping develop young peoples' world views
As opposed to straight up government propaganda in textbooks? At least chatgpt averages out everyone’s propaganda.
edit for clarity: this comment applies to history books, literature, stuff like that. If you look carefully you’ll notice they’re full of stuff designed to instill a sense of national identity and patriotism. Especially obvious when you look at different nation’s textbooks about the same historical events described from opposing sides.
Well growing up I got a Slovenian-centric perspective. Except in elementary and middle school it was still a little Yugoslavian-centric because we hadn’t yet quite decided what we wanted to highlight. Very interesting transformation to observe in real time.
ChatGPT in general has been pretty decent about saying “Well different people describe this differently …”. Much better than any textbook I remember from school.
